Well-Ordered Chaos » organizing

The Dreaded Kitchen Table

Addy — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 02:12:18 +0000

Well, I did it. After a year of allowing my kitchen table to become submerged under an ever-growing pile of random clutter, I finally reclaimed it:

It's a work table with work on it, even.

This is exactly the kind of work I need to be able to do on this table. I have a large piece of handmade paper with flowers pressed into it, but it’s so delicate that the flowers are in constant danger of coming off. I need to put down a layer of medium to make sure they stay put.

Here’s what the table looked like when I began:

Kitchen Table, Before

I started by separating everything into piles on the floor according to my categories. I discovered that I had five categories: art supplies, medications and first aid, cooking utensils, stuff to go upstairs, and papers to be filed. Since the rest of my home is pretty organized, dealing with these categories was pretty straightfoward — art supplies were put away in the studio area, first aid stuff in the medicine cabinet, and cooking utensils in the kitchen drawers.

The “upstairs” stuff had been the pebble that started the landslide, way back last Spring. I have a bunch of knick-knacks and stuff that I have no place to display, so I’m keeping them in a closet upstairs for now. For whatever reason, when I reorganized my studio last Spring, I didn’t ever get around to putting them away. As a result, the table started attracting random crap, and the situation snowballed.

This is an object lesson for a treacherous part of the organizing process. You see, by the time you’re about 90% done with your organizing project, you will stop, and you will take a look at what’s left to do. You will think to yourself, “I’m almost done. I’m tired, and I’m bored, and I’ll just finish this tomorrow.”

Well, don’t, because you won’t. You’ll forget about it, and pretty soon your chaos will be like you never tried to tame it. So learn from my sorry tale, kids, finish the job the first time.

Art Studio Drama

Addy — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:55:08 +0000

In my last post, which was supposed to be published last week and instead was published yesterday, I wrote that I was going to do some maintenance organizing on my art studio. Since I did a major re-org last Spring, I thought it would be pretty easy — just put stuff away, do some cleaning, The End. The hard part, I thought, would be the kitchen table, which was under a famous pile of crap and hadn’t been seen in almost a year. The hardest part would be the filing system I have yet to create.

Well, it turns out that my studio wasn’t as organized as I thought:

Duplicates, Triplicates, and Quadruplicates. Something here isn't working.

For those of you playing at home, that’s two Jenkin’s Greens (1 oz. and 4 oz), two Bone Blacks (both 4 oz), two Raw Umbers (both 4 oz), three Burnt Siennas (two 1 oz, 1 4 oz) and FOUR, count ‘em, four Iridescent Copper Lights (two 1 oz and two 4 oz).

Lots of duplicates are a sign that there are holes in an organizing system. If you’re system is working, you know what you have, and you know what you don’t have; you wind up saving money because you’re not buying things you don’t know you already have at home.

The weird thing is that I have at least three dozen colors of paint, and most of them are not duplicated. So what’s the deal with these four colors? What is it about Copper and Burnt Sienna that makes me think I need to buy third and fourth bottles?

And my troubles do not stop at paint.

The last time I went to Blick Art Supply, I bought a pint of gesso and a pint of Golden 200 Medium. I don’t use gesso all that often, but I had recently looked for it and was unable to find it. I had been certain that I had most of a tub lying around — but it was nowhere to be found, it seemed, so obviously I must have used it up. Right?

I hid it from myself in plain sight

I found my half-used quart tub of gesso when I was cleaning. The trouble is, it wasn’t in my basket of mediums, which lives on the left trestle shelf of my studio table, like it was supposed to be. It was sitting on the right trestle shelf. It was in plain view, but I didn’t look for it on the right, so I didn’t see it.

Again, if my problem was only a tub of medium that strayed from its home, I’d feel like I was in pretty good shape. But when I cleaned out my medium basket, I discovered that I was not running low on Golden 200 Medium like I thought.

... and this is AFTER consolidating two half-used containers

No. In addition to my mostly-used bottle of medium, I had another full bottle, as well as a quart sized container that was about a third full. I poured that into my mostly used bottle. Now I have three pint-sized bottles, two of which are unopened.

Clearly, there is something about my studio organization that isn’t … well, organized. I think I’m out of things when I’m not, and so I buy more, and art supplies are expensive. I know I’ll use all of this stuff eventually, but I would rather not be floating the money I’ve spent on these duplicate items — it’s easily a hundred dollars or more. And that’s to say nothing of the space that’s being taken up by duplicate containers of paint and mediums.

For now, I just need to get this crap off my floor, so I’ll put it back where it was. But I need to come up with a new system. I thought the old system was working well, so I’m stumped.

Resolved to get organized in 2010? You don’t have to go it alone.

Addy — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:22:21 +0000

It’s the New Year, and that means New Year’s it’s time for New Year’s resolutions.

One of the most popular New Year’s resolutions, year in and year out, is to “get organized”. According to the National Association of Professional Organizers, who polled more than 400 adults last November, 71% of respondents felt that their quality of life would improve if they were more organized. 65 percent described their home as “at least moderately disorganized”, and 27 percent said disorder keeps them from being effective at work. Furthermore, 96 percent of respondents believe that better organization could save them precious time every day, with 30 percent of respondents reporting that they could save at least 30 minutes each day, and 15 percent of respondents felt they could save more than an hour each
day.

To put that in perspective, 30 minutes a day adds up to a whole week every year. An hour a day adds up to fifteen days — that’s more than two weeks — each year.

If you’re an adult with ADD, chances are that you’re more disorganized than most, and that getting organized will be more of a challenge than it might be for other folks. You may have started your New Year’s organizing resolution and gotten stuck. Fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone. The Adult ADD declutter group, in association with addclasses.com, is meeting for the next three weeks to provide an online chat forum to support its members in decluttering. The cost is $147 for three classes, but if you sign up by January 8th, it’s only $47.

I’ve had good luck with long-distance group coaching in the past. It tends to work best if you’ve already gotten a toe-hold in your organizing project; for instance, if you know what you need to know, but are having trouble motivating yourself, or if you’ve already set up a system that you need to maintain. So check it out, and good luck!

My Organizing Journey: Getting Started — The Staging Area and the Big Sort

Addy — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:16:48 +0000

There’s a lot of wisdom in the old adage “A Place for Everything and Everything In Its Place”. However, if your space hasn’t been organized before, most of what you own does not yet have its own “place”. This is why it’s important to set aside a portion of your home as a staging area. Ideally, this is a space that’s a little inconvenient to get to (so you’re not tempted to dump anything and everything there) but also big enough to contain all of the items you come across that don’t belong in the space you’re organizing, but that don’t yet have a “home”. We chose a part of the bedroom that isn’t in the way of foot traffic. Since we had to climb a spiral staircase to get there, we wouldn’t be tempted to use it as a repository for anything we were too lazy to put away.

What happens if you choose an area that’s in the general flow of traffic? So glad you asked. When I reorganized my art studio last Spring, I used the kitchen table as my staging area. At first, it just had a few things on it. Now it looks like this:

The flowers sure add class! And yes, that is a sock.

Anyway.

When we started organizing my food prep area, we knew that there would be four major categories. The first category was anything that didn’t belong in the kitchen, period. The second was any item that definitely belonged in the food prep area. The third category was for items that belonged in the kitchen, but not in the food prep area. The fourth was for those duplicate or unnecessary items that could be donated to charity. was for anything that was too trashed to be worth keeping. Finally, the was for anything that was too trashed to be worth keeping.

The food prep area consists of the following:

a counter
an oven/stove top
two storage cupboards
two drawers
a sink, and an under-sink cupboard

Adjacent to the food prep area are additional storage areas and appliances. There are:

a dishwasher
the water-heater closet
a tiny alcove with glass shelves

There’s also another tiny alcove with the following:

a tiny counter
a lower cabinet
a drawer
an upper cabinet

The dishwasher is in the way, and there's not a lot of space to move around it.

I initially had a huge mental block about the dishwasher. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I felt like I had to keep it in front of the sink; I used it in front of the sink, and the only place where it was really out of the way was the water heater closet. My friend pointed out that the darn thing is on wheels and it’s not that hard to move. Besides, I didn’t need to get into the water heater closet that often — and when I did, moving the dishwasher out of the way was not a big deal. So we took everything out of the water-heater closet (except the water heater, of course) and duly moved the dishwasher to its new home. It made a huge improvement.

Having moved the dishwasher to a more sensible location, we emptied out all of the cabinets and all of the shelves. We took everything out from under the sink. We took everything out of the drawers. We took everything off the counters. Then we stared for at it for awhile in order to figure out what we had.

My Organizing Journey: Getting Started — Identifying Activity Zones

Addy — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:15:27 +0000

The big day had arrived. My clutter buddy was at my home and by the end of that day I would, come hell or high water, have made some progress on organizing my home. My confidence had received a boost from learning that my apparently chaotic surroundings were actually a somewhat functional attempt to be organized, but I was nonetheless apprehensive. I had put so much work into organizing schemes and solutions over the years, and none of them had stuck. Could this attempt really be any different?

Fortunately, I had someone there to talk me down, in the form of my clutter buddy Jana. We had decided to start with part of my kitchen; since I used it every day, it would be easier to maintain, and the returns on our efforts would be immediate.

Having read about the “zone” system of organizing from Organizing From the Inside Out, we went through my kitchen and determined that there were several activity zones. Julie Morgenstern is a huge advocate of what she calls “the kindergarten classroom model” of organizing. A kindergarten classroom is broken up into activity areas: there’s a reading area, a dress-up area, an arts-and-crafts area, etc. The supplies used in each activity are stored in their “zone”, making clean-up easy and sometimes even fun.

In my kitchen, there were several zones, some of them overlapping.

The food preparation area; this was the area with the sink, the stove top and oven, and some storage cupboards.
The storage and pantry area, unfortunately located across the room from the food prep zone.
The laundry area is pretty much on top of the food prep zone, since the washer-dryer is a stacking unit that
The eating area, with the kitchen table and chairs, was adjacent to the microwave and the pantry zone.
The admin area was a built-in light table on one of the kitchen walls (the owners of the home are filmmakers) that we were using to store mailing supplies and notepads for taking phone messages.
Finally, there was the cat zone, where the cats’ water dish, food dishes, food, and grooming supplies were stored.

Click here to go to Part 2 of Getting Started: What’s Working? What’s Not?

The perfect is the enemy of my enemy is my … wait, what?

Addy — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:19:22 +0000

This weekend I wrote a Squidoo lens about tabby cats.

Why tabby cats?

Well, a Squidoo community that I’m a part of has been having weekly contests, and last week’s was to write a lens for the “animals and nature” category. I figured this would be good for me; all of my lenses to date have been about my various cognitive issues, and some of them have been pretty heavy. I chose “tabby cats” as my topic for two reasons: one, I have two tabby cats; and number two, I am such a nerd that I have actually phenotyped my cats.

That’s right, I was reading about cat genetics several years ago on the internet, and armed with the information I found about dominant and recessive alleles, I figured out which genes both of my cats express. I did this for fun.

Anyway, I figured that I’d be able to write this lens in my sleep. But then I decided that I wanted to illustrate the lens with photos of my actual cats. So I had to take pictures of them, and then download them, and then crop them, and then upload them, and then write blurbs about what they illustrated …

And in short, the lens took me twenty #%*@ing hours. Gah. Actually, a lot of my lenses, and my blog entries, and anything else I write, tends to take me way longer than I feel it should. You may have noticed that I can’t write a blog entry without writing an essay.

I know I’d be more productive if I could let it go sometimes. One of my MFA profs liked to tell a story about a pottery class in which half the students were told that they’d be graded on the quality of one perfect pot, so they spent the entire term on that one pot. The other half of the class was told they’d be graded on the number of pots they produced; the quality of the pieces didn’t matter. Those students spent the term madly making pots, as many as they could.

Guess which group produced the best ceramics?

If you know anything about the creative process, you won’t be surprised to learn that it was the second group. They felt free to experiment and make mistakes, because the only thing that mattered was that they made as many pots as they could. They felt free, and it showed in their work.

What does this have to do with ADD and organization? Well, I’ve been reading a lot about time management lately, and it turns out that perfectionism is a common ADD trait. It’s also a huge drain on productivity. It certainly tell you that it messes with my life. I don’t update my blogs as often as I would like, because I feel like I have to say something profound, and I feel obligated to add graphics (that takes quite a bit of time, actually).

So I am hereby resolving to write my blog posts without worrying how “good” they are. It’s a blog, dammit, not a New Yorker article or a PhD thesis. Some posts will be extensive and detailed. Others, well, they’ll just be blog posts.

Entryway continues

Addy — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:28:02 +0000

Today I’m picking up some of my containers from The Container Store on the way back from my med check. I’m on a low dose at the moment, thanks to the asshats who broke into my car last week, destroying the ignition, and forcing me to deal with that emergency instead of making my doctor’s appointment. The joy of stimulants is that they’re controlled substances, so you can’t just get refills.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to containerizing some of my closet chaos. I’ll be sure to take photos, and later in the week I’ll write up the process.

In the mean time, why not take a productivity break and check out Cake Wrecks? Pictures of professionally decorated cakes, gone terribly, horribly wrong.

My Organizing Journey Begins

Addy — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:00:30 +0000

My organizing journey began in the fall of 2005 when a friend of mine called me with an interesting proposition.

“I think we should help each other get organized”, she said.

I was stunned. “Get organized? Help each other?” I asked. “How can I be any help to you at all? You’re pretty organized already. I’m a chaos demon. I think I just need to come to terms with that.”

“I realize that I know more about organizing than you do,” said my friend. “That’s OK. But I just moved in with my partner, I’ve got a lot of unpacking to do, and two people’s stuff to deal with. I could use the company. And I think I could help you a lot.”

“Look, I’m grateful, I really am. I’m happy to help you get unpacked. I just don’t think I’ll ever be organized. Honestly. I’ve tried EVERYTHING. You wouldn’t believe the money I’ve wasted on containers and drawer organizers. Besides, I’m in grad school, and I have a job … I have no time and no money.”

“Do you have one afternoon a week?” she asked.

“Well, I guess Friday afternoons are free”, I said.

“Great. If I recommend a book, a single, inexpensive book, are you willing to buy it?”

“I don’t know. I feel like I’ve read everything and nothing works. Besides, I’ve got a ton of reading to do already.”

“You haven’t read this,” my friend told me. “And it’s easy. It won’t take you any time at all.”

“OK, fine, I’ll buy the book”, I said. “I just don’t want you to feel bad if this doesn’t work.”

“I know you’ve had a lot of bad experiences in the past, but I know you, and I really think this will work. I wouldn’t be suggesting it otherwise,” my friend said. “Go find that book. And I’ll see you Friday.”

Hmph, I thought to myself after I hung up. We’ll just see about this book.

The book, Julie Morgenstern’s Organizing from the Inside Out, would change my life. Using it, I was actually able to organize my space, starting a cascade of healthy, positive change that has completely transformed the way I see myself.

Organizing An Entryway, Step 3: Sorting

Addy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:39:35 +0000

This is the third post in my Organizing an Entryway series. I’m breaking it down into steps that are as small as possible to prevent ADD overwhelm.

Now that I can actually walk in my entryway, I’m ready for the third step of the process (and the first step of the SPACE process): sorting.

Sorting actually contains two smaller steps: the first is to empty EVERYTHING in the space you’re working in. Empty every shelf, every closet, every coat hook (in this case I left the bookshelf alone, since I know I’m getting rid of it and everything on it). I spread some sheets on the living room floor so I’d have a nice big space to put everything I was working with:

Everything in the entryway. Well, except the litter box.

As I emptied the entryway, I did some preliminary sorting; for instance, I made separate piles for clothing, hats, and hiking equipment. Then I started sorting the clothes. I hung all the dressy clothing up out of the way, and was left with a pile of outerwear. I discovered that between me and my husband, we have four fleece vests, ten fleece jackets, and five raincoats. That isn’t counting the one he’s is wearing on his business trip.

That's a lot of jackets

As I sorted, I discovered that my husband (from here on I’ll call him M, for My husband) has two blue fleece vests, three black fleece jackets, two black windbreakers that I never see him wear, and a wind-blocking fleece jacket that he also doesn’t wear. I put all of these on an “ask M” pile. He has a down parka that he needs when he travels to colder climates, but doesn’t need much in San Francisco, so I hung it in the closet.

M's Jackets

As for my own outerwear, I had two fleece jackets, two fleece vests, both of which are a bit large on me, and two raincoats — an ultralight jacket and a heavier rain parka. I’ve recently lost weight, so most of this clothing is too big. I put the too-large fleece jacket in a give-away pile, and kept the one that fits. I’m holding on to the raincoats until I can replace them with something that fits, and one of the vests fits well enough to be useful. The other one I’m keeping as back-up gear, since it doesn’t take up that much space, and I sometimes go camping with newbies who don’t bring enough warm clothing.

A's jackets

I put the “ask M” pile on a chair, and put my own stuff away. The next major category was the dressy clothes that live in the closet:

Long, dressy clothing

The reason our dress clothes live in the entry way is that our home is a converted storefront. The bedroom is a loft, with closets along each side of the room, under the eves of the roof. This provides ample storage space, with only one drawback: the ceiling in the closets comes down much too low to store long pieces of clothing such as dresses, robes, or long coats. The only place to keep them is in the entryway closet, which is an odd place for long dresses, but such is life.

Sorting the dress clothes was a somewhat complicated task. The easy parts were my husband’s best suit and his trench coat, which I hung in the closet. The harder parts were my own clothes, because I had to try each of them on in order to decide whether they were worth keeping. As I finished trying them on, I separated them into three categories: things to keep, things to sell, and things that could be altered to fit me. Given the fiasco with the books, I’ve set a deadline for myself: anything I haven’t taken action on by November 15, I will give away. In the mean time, I put them back in the closet.

This takes me to step 4: assessing the storage needs of my space.

Organizing an Entryway, Step 2: The Pre-Sort

Addy — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:32:49 +0000

This is the second post in my Organizing an Entryway series. I’m breaking it down into steps that are as small as possible to prevent ADD overwhelm.

The second step in my organizing process is a quick pre-sort. This is a quick way to get rid of two categories of stuff: things that don’t belong in a space, and obvious DTPCA’s. What’s a DTPCA? With apologies to Dan Savage of Savage Love, DTPCA stands for “Ditch That Piece of Crap Already”, and it applies to any object that qualifies uncategorically as garbage. DTPCAs include any item that is broken, that’s missing half its component parts, or things like excess shopping bags and shoeboxes.

A quick look at my entryway told me that there were several things in it that had homes elsewhere. There were two suitcases that could be put away, and of course, the suitcases themselves contained things that one doesn’t generally store in one’s entryway. The first one had a bunch of spices in it that I’d gotten on my trip, because I wanted to avoid paying the nearly 10% sales tax at the Penzey’s in the Bay Area… after buying them in the Twin Cities, I realized that they’re food and therefore not subject to sales tax.

Suitcase full of spices, even though I don't actually cook in my entryway. Silly chaos demon!

The second suitcase had some t-shirts and socks in it that I could have been wearing this last month.

I was wondering where all my clothes went.

The first thing I did was to the clothes in the wash, and the spices in the kitchen. Then I put the luggage away. The enormous pile of bags and boxes next to the door are mostly DTPOCAs. The bags turned out to be filled with recycling or with other plastic bags, and most of the boxes were useless. I kept a few of them boxes to ship books. The rest I recycled.

Ditch That Piece Of Crap Already

It can be tempting to hold onto boxes. They look so useful, don’t they? You can use them for shipping, for storage, you never know when they’ll come in handy, right?

Wrong. Cardboard boxes are terrible for storage, because you can’t see what’s inside of them. And very few boxes are actually useful for shipping. If a box originally held shoes, or a computer, or a cell phone, the size and shape are going to be too odd to be really good for shipping anything; chances are, if you keep it, you won’t use it. Remember, whether you rent or own, you’re paying for the space you use to store those boxes. Is it really worth it to occupy that space with pieces of cardboard?

Once I pre-sorted, my space looked much more manageable:

Ah, that's better!

I’ll leave you with an image of the worst DTPCA that I found in my entryway — a piece of stale, moldy flat bread, presumably from a some time over the summer.

The fact that I found it in a bag from The Container Store is a nice bit of irony.

The next step is sorting, so stay tuned!